OLPC India

2007 status: green
green

Pilot in Khairat school

India is a very large multicultural country with 35 states and union territories, most of them size of a country elsewhere and a multitude of interest groups. Adopting OLPC in India will not only revolutionize the way we India's children learn, the vision behind this "educational" project, but will also scale up the eco-system of sharing between the diverse set of communities existing in the Indian Subcontinent.

OLPC India Foundation (OIF)

OLPC made a start in India with a pilot deployment in a rural village at Khairat near Navi Mumbai where laptops have been deployed and every child carries one laptop home.

April 2008 : The journey was tremendous in terms of learning and working on Khairat. And the project expanded to several other schools as well. Parikrma in Bangalore, Katha in New Delhi and some smaller ones in UP and other parts of Maharashtra have shown very promising results.

Now OLPC has an organization in India that was started with the appointment of Satish Jha as the President and CEO in July 2008 and later established as OLPC India Foundation (OIF). OIF is reaching out to the governments, NGOs, corporations, international bodies and anyone who has significant interest to contribute to this movement.

By early 2010 seven state governments took a decision to go ahead with the deployment of OLPC. Kerala was the first state to order OLPC and Manipur followed suite. In 2010 its pilots also expanded to the states of Rajasthan and Uttarakhand.

Katha has been mandated to take its model to several million children in Delhi and they are excited about XO changing the world of children of Delhi's slums around Govindpuri. The work done at one of the school named Katha Khazana setup by Katha in New Delhi can be found here OLPC India/Katha_Chronicle.

Manipur

The Government of Manipur has been a long standing champion of OLPC. They were quick to realize its potential at a presentation in March 2009 and approved the procurement within a week. That was a record speed for a Government to order 75000 OLPCs. However, they ordered that the first pilot of 1000 OLPC XOs must start ASAP. As OLPC India Foundation is a not for profit Trust in India, it did not have all the business resources and employees who understood the procurement process like a corporation and it took several months to conclude the order. The Chief Minister Ibobi Singh, Union Minister Agatha Sangma, the Education Minister Jayantha have made public commitments to run with OLPC as the State's Education Strategy.

Kerala

The government of Kerala has been the most enthusiastic supporter of OLPC. The Government placed an order on OLPC within a day of the presentation. However, the concurrent status of primary education means that whatever the state government may do, it requires consultations with the Central Government. The Indian Education Ministry however kept delaying the process despite repeated requests by the Govt of Kerala. Now Kerala may decided to go on its own.

Uttar Pradesh

The Government of Uttar Pradesh, a northern state in India announced in the Indian Express in September 2009 that they were going ahead with OLPC under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, often referred to as SSA and meaning "Universal Education Movement" and the Board of SSA in the State cleared it and requested the Central Board to allow it to go ahead with the plan. Understandably, the Central Government's SSA Board authorized the Government of Uttar Pradesh to go ahead with their plan. It is understood that the UP Government would prefer to be freed from the constraints that SSA imposes on the state's education expenditure.

Himachal Pradesh

Himachal Pradesh Principal Secretary of Education announced in March 2010 through a news item by Press Trust of India that they were seriously considering OLPC as the innovative vehicle for education in the state.

Bihar

The Times of India announced in early April that the Principal Secretary of Education was seriously considering OLPC as the state's education strategy. Soon after Intel approached the government offering a discounted price. However, Intel's Classmate does not meet the needs of the State the way OLPC does. One more effort by Intel to attack OLPC in a state where it created huge amount of goodwill on its own.

Rajasthan

From May 7 to 11 , some college students from Linux Users group Bikaner (LUGB) went to Kikarwali village , Rai Singh Nagar Tehsil of Shri Ganganagar District to teach at the government secondary school. The proceedings involved educating the school children and the public with the concept of OLPC, giving practical sesssion on XO laptops and teaching some of the local teacher as well.

Deployments

Current

• Katha Khazana School, Govindpuri, Kalkaji, New Delhi
• Chiragh Grammar School, Uttar Pradesh
• Khairat school, Khairat-Dhangarwada Village, Maharashtra (DBF Project)
• Parikrma Center for Learning, Bangalore (DBF Project)
• Aradhna Convent School, Bangalore (DBF Project)
• Holy Mother School, Nashik (DBF Project)
• Saint-Anthony School, Dugawar (U.P.) (DBF Project)
• Auroville, Tamil Nadu (DBF Project)
• Mandal Parishad Primary School, Aziznagar,Hyderabad (DBF Project)

Potential

• Venu Udayar Middle School, Palayanur village, Tamil Nadu.
• Poorva Maadhyamik Vidyalaya (Pre Middle School) पूर्व माध्यमिक विद्यालय , Bhagmalpur, District Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh
• Chiragh Grammar School, Meerut (U.P.) and Project Writeup
• Belgaum District, Karnataka
• Belgaum District, Karnataka
• Ahmedabad, Gujarat funded by MangoTree Group

OLPC India Student Chapter

OLPC India Student Chapter was an organization whose primary aim was to spread awareness about OLPC in India and unite the students of various universities, colleges and schools. The organization was formed on 5th February 2008 at a seminar in Punjab University, Chandigarh.

To know more about OLPC India Student Chapter click HERE.

OLPC rajasthan

G S S kikarwali being the first school to distribute XO laptop under olpc program . A team of 9 members from linux user group bikaner (LUGB) visit g s s kikarwali for 4 days to make the student teacher and parents aware of XO and OLPC.

OLPC Pune

A meeting of volunteers who are interested in OLPC project took place on 14th Feb in Pune city of Maharashtra.It has been decided to start an OLPC volunteers group in Pune.Initial discussions are going on.

More about Pune activities here: OLPC Pune

OLPC Mumbai

The efforts undertaken for this movement in Mumbai, information of volunteers, tasks undertaken and completed projects right from Mumbai,Maharashtra.The first meeting held on March 14, 2009.

For further information and updates refer the link : OLPC Mumbai

Languages needed for localization

Which language or languages are needed for localization for use by children in India please?

INDIA has 28 states and 24 official languages. The language with the largest number of speakers is Hindi however it is not a majority language. Because of the large number of languages, English has become the lingua franca in business and government. However, this is neither British nor American English but a distinct Indian dialect with its own unique vocabulary and style.

According to Ethnologue, 180,000,000 people in India speak Hindi. It is the official language of Arunachal Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Bihar, Chandigarh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal.

The other important languages and their respective states and population numbers are as below:

In addition to Hindi and English:

• Assamese — official language of Assam (15,334,000 speakers)
• Bengali — official language of Tripura and West Bengal (70,561,000 speakers)
• Bodo — official language of Assam (70,561,000 speakers)
• Dogri — official language of Jammu and Kashmir (2,105,000 speakers)
• Gondi — language of the Gond tribals of the Gondwana (part of the northern Deccan plateau) comprising Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh. (2,632,000 speakers)
• Gujarati — language of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Gujarat (45,479,000 speakers)
• Kannada — official language of Karnataka (35,346,000 speakers)
• Kashmiri — official language of Jammu and Kashmir (4,391,000 speakers)
• Konkani — official language of Goa (4,000,000 speakers)
• Malayalam — official language of Kerala and Lakshadweep (35,351,000 speakers)
• Maithili - official language of Bihar (22,000,000 speakers)
• Marathi — official language of Maharashtra (68,030,000 speakers)
• Meitei or Meithei — official language of Manipur (1,240,000 speakers)
• Nepali — official language of Sikkim (6,000,000 speakers)
• Oriya — official language of Orissa (31,666,000 speakers)
• Punjabi — official language of Punjab and Chandigarh, second official language of Delhi and Haryana (27,109,000 speakers)
• Sanskrit — language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, required teaching in many schools (6,106 speakers)
• Santali - language of the Santhal tribals of the Chota Nagpur Plateau (comprising the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa and Chattisgarh) (5,959,000 speakers)
• Sindhi - language of the Sindhi community (2,812,000 speakers)
• Tamil — official language of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry (61,527,000 speakers)
• Telugu — official language of Andhra Pradesh (69,634,000 speakers)
• Urdu — official language of Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh (48,062,000 speakers)

These are only estimates of numbers of speakers, of course, and refer to first languages, roughly the language spoken in the home. Sanskrit is spoken as the first language only in a few Brahmin families(and few villages where everyone speaks the language irrespective of caste). Some of the numbers are from 1997.

Dictionary_indian_languages

Localized Educational Content

OLPC India volunteers along with the alumni of PUMBA (Pune University MBA) have worked on making primary school textbooks in various Indian Languages available on XO.

Click here to access the website where the ebooks are available

Projects

BoomingBang

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'Introduction- BoomingBang is a third person RPG arcade game* whose idea was taken from Wormux. Similarly like Wormux, BoomingBang emphasizes on Performance over style, using SDL library and XML as well as a great deal of C programming :)

This project is monitored by Abhishek Indoria , 15, a junior year student who is currently active in working with Phoenix-Team which is a 29 members team. Please visit [ http://phoenix-team.tk Phoenix-Team official Website ] for more information.

The basic mission of players is to eliminate all other players from the game in a funny way.

You control a team of creatures, be it a penguin or Pigeon or a bull. You try various methods, like dropping them into water by pushing them towards water from a hill, or hitting them with bat and send them flying, to give them a vomiting injection and you'll see them vomiting(Be careful, stand around the vomited surface too long and you will find yourself in grave),booming them with a funny bazooka or removing surface under them so if the move, BINGO!

More information at: The BoomingBang Sub-Official Site

JUPITER1.0

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Introduction-This project is founded by SCOMST (School of Computer Science and Technology) which is part of a not-for-profit organization in a small town called Yavatmal in Maharashtra State, India. The project is currently in the Architecture/Design phase. Manusheel Gupta and Lauren Klein from OLPC are supporting this project.

Project description- Jupiter is called "Brhaspati" (बृहस्पति) in the Sanskrit language and refers to the "Guru" (preceptor) of the Gods. The ultimate aim of Jupiter is to make self-study software for OLPC so intelligent and powerful that, just by knowing age and/or grade level and language of a student, it should be able to teach the student appropriate subjects and create learning database(s) for her. Based on the learning record, it should be able to find the next level of course(s) for the student. With just the OLPC laptop, any remote student should be able to develop her literacy up to any level. Creating the courses for each level will be a part of this project. Information on this project will be updated on this page periodically.

More information at: Details

WEB-TEACHER

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WEB-TEACHER - SCOMST is making lot of effort to remotely connect to village/small town schools via internet and teach/guide the students in their career development. The idea is to use remote desktop sharing along with voice/video conferencing softwares to present the ideas and guide the students remotely. OLPC's schoool server along with the laptop's mesh networking will be very usefull for remote teaching. SCOMST will experiment various softwares with OLPC Laptop and find out the best possible solution for WEB-TEACHER program.

COMPLETE ONLINE EDUCATION SYSTEM

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COES - This section describes about how the whole education system can be made complete online. More TDB.

OLPC India Day

OLPC India Day was held on August 4, 2008. More information is available at http://www.olpc.co.in/olpcindiaday/ Photos are posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/prashantbthakkar/OLPCIndiaDay

External Links

IndLinux Language Teams: Hindi, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu

Other Localization Teams: Dzongkha (Bhutan), Nepali (Nepal), Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Pan Localization

Janabhaaratii Linux localization project: Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam

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Primary Language	,|x|Language spoken::x}}
Number of Laptops	Number of manufactured laptops::750
Keyboard Layout	Keyboard::OLPC Devanagari Keyboard
Build	,|x|Software release::x}}
Date(s) Arrived in Country	,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}}
School Server	,|x|School server status::x}}
Deployment Status	[[Deployment status::Khairat - 31 XOs (1 teacher). Currently running 656. No Internet, had it but offline now. School server with very old build. Katha has 30. Vasant Valley School is a new champion with its Director Arun Kapur taking the lead in taking it forward. Rajasthan's Keekarwali village in Shriganganagar has deployed 50. Nainital in Uttarakhand just deployed for all the children of a school in April, 2010. Cognizant supported several schools in Chennai.]]